Newfoundland’s missing Amelia Earhart statue is found, but not everyone is happy

Police led Elaine Traverse into an interrogation room inside the RCMP detachment in the small Newfoundland town of Harbour Grace last August. Did she want to speak to a lawyer? They asked.

“Why would I need to speak to a lawyer?” she recalled saying. “I did nothing wrong.”

But police, and eventually the whole town, thought she did.

Over the next few hours, Ms. Traverse, 67, realized no one saw her as the hero who stumbled upon the town’s stolen statue of famed aviator Amelia Earhart. Crying in the police station, she realized she was the prime suspect.

The small fishing town of Harbour Grace is tucked into a nook on the expansive Conception Bay, one of the easternmost points in North America. It’s a destination for history and aviation buffs, the place where Ms. Earhart launched the first solo transatlantic flight by a woman, on May 20, 1932.

The search for Amelia Earhart shows why some mysteries should never be solved

The connection to Ms. Earhart is a source of pride in the town. Stories resound of how she set off in her red Lockheed Vega with a Thermos of beef-and-vegetable soup gifted by a local hotelier. The Conception Bay museum has a room dedicated to her. And in the park, a monument overlooks the airfield where she flew into the sunset almost a century ago – or at least it did.

The bronze statue, designed by Saskatchewan’s Lorne Rostotski and sculpted by Bulgarian-Canadian Luben Boykov, vanished last spring in the middle of the night. The brazen theft of something considered so sacred and erected with much fanfare in 2007 outraged locals, and reverberated across the Avalon Peninsula and beyond.

“Who would do such a thing?” posted the Ninety-Nines, the international organization of women pilots that Ms. Earhart founded. “We can only hope the thieves are caught before this meaningful piece of history is lost forever.”

The motive, many surmised, was cash. But unfortunately for the thieves, the composition of the metal in the statue is almost like a fingerprint, sculptor Morgan MacDonald said. Scrapyards were told to be on the lookout for the unusual alloy.

The town pleaded for the public’s help. It took at least three thieves to steal the 300-kilogram, seven-foot statue – security footage from a nearby convenience store showed a red SUV picking up two people at the Spirit of Harbour Grace Municipal Park at 2:45 a.m. on April 24.

“Sad what the skeets get up to these days,” one man wrote on the town’s social-media post, using Newfoundland slang for a petty criminal.

Months passed and rumours were spun: it was thrown in the sea, it had been taken to the U.S.

And if it weren’t for Ms. Traverse, the whereabouts of the statue might have remained a mystery, like Ms. Earhart herself, who vanished somewhere in the Pacific during a bid to circumnavigate the globe in 1937.

The retired grandmother was driving home to Heart’s Delight, about a 40-minute trip from Harbour Grace, with a load of groceries last August, when she turned down a familiar dirt road to let her dog Mya out for a run.

Free to roam, Mya barked at something in the trees. Ms. Traverse peered in and spied something brown. Is it a body? she recalled thinking.

She drove home and collected her son, David Traverse, who soon waded into the trees.

“Mother, that’s the statue,” she recalled him saying.

By this time, the stolen statue had been all over the news, including the fact that there was a reward out for information leading to its return – $25,000 pledged by anonymous donors and local businesses.

“Oh my god, Dave, what are we going to do?” Ms. Traverse recalled saying.

Police and then mayor of Harbour Grace Don Coombs with the statue after it was found.Supplied

Several days later, after some inquiries about the reward, she led Mounties down the dirt road to the statue. It lay in pieces, with the head severed, the torso cut, both legs and the left arm sawed off.

Police took the pieces back to the station where they laid them out on a picnic table, posing triumphantly alongside then-mayor Don Coombs.

But police were skeptical. Inside the station, an officer peppered Ms. Traverse with questions for hours. Police brought up her son, who had recently faced a raft of criminal charges, including theft.

“I said, ‘My son was in jail, how could he do it?’”

Unconvinced, police hooked Ms. Traverse and her son up to polygraph tests, which she said they passed. But it didn’t seem to matter. Many in the town had made up their minds. The prevailing theory was that Ms. Traverse had orchestrated the theft to claim the reward.

“I have not had anything to do with the theft of this statue,” said Ms. Traverse. “I’m disabled. I can’t even lift a 15 pound bag of potatoes. So how am I going to lift the statue?”

Ms. Traverse said she saw nasty comments from people online, calling her a thief. In public, people stopped greeting her and averted their eyes. She no longer felt welcome on her community’s recreation committee. Feeling ostracized, she moved to another town an hour-and-a-half away.

“I’ve been put through the ringer, to put it politely,” she said. “The people in my community have turned against me.”

As for the statue, the pieces were soon in the hands of sculptor Morgan MacDonald at the Newfoundland Bronze Foundry. He spent months welding it back together and reinforcing it with a stainless steel skeleton.

Sculptor Morgan MacDonald works on the statue at his bronze foundry in Logy Bay, N.L., in December.Greg Locke/The Globe and Mail

Mr. MacDonald said it was fortunate that he’d apprenticed with the original artist, Mr. Boykov, so he knew how to disguise the new weld marks, a delicate and meticulous process of applying chemicals and heat.

“There’s probably a handful of people that could’ve recreated that colour or been familiar with the process,” he said.

The town, elated to get the statue back, is planning a rededication ceremony in May. Already, town officials say national and international aviators’ groups, including the Ninety-Nines, plan to be there.

Newfoundland sculptor Morgan MacDonald is in the business of immortalizing heroes

“We’re going to have a major party, that’s the best way to celebrate her coming back,” Harbour Grace town councillor Christina Hearn said.

Ms. Traverse, meanwhile, didn’t get the reward, which she says is disappointing because of the social price she’s already paid. But Ms. Hearn said the reward was always contingent on the return of the statue and information that led to an arrest. So far that hasn’t happened.

In a recent statement, RCMP Corporal Jesse O’Donaghey wrote, “the identity of the person or persons responsible for the theft remains unknown.” Police continue to investigate.

Report an editorial error

Report a technical issue

Editorial code of conduct

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Andrew Saunders, President and CEO

Lindsay Jones is The Globe and Mail’s Atlantic reporter based in Halifax. Prior to joining The Globe in 2023, she was a freelance journalist who contributed award-winning feature stories to a number of publications in Canada and the U.S.

Her 2017 investigation What Happened to Lionel Desmond? An Afghanistan veteran whose war wouldn't end led to the launch of a provincial public inquiry and was nominated for a Canadian Association of Journalists Award.

Lindsay's human-interest narratives are often told through a feminist lens, and shine a light on police accountability and how people are impacted by systems and policies. Her Atavist story The Lives of Others, about two men who were switched at birth in rural Newfoundland and Labrador, was chosen by Longreads’ Best of 2021 features, reprinted in Reader’s Digest International, and nominated for a National Magazine Award. Her reporting has led to more switched-at-birth revelations, and she continues to chronicle the ripple effects of these healthcare mistakes among families in Canada.

Welcome to The Globe and Mail’s comment community. This is a space where subscribers can engage with each other and Globe staff. Non-subscribers can read and sort comments but will not be able to engage with them in any way. Click here to subscribe.

If you would like to write a letter to the editor, please forward it to letters@globeandmail.com. ","preambleRegistered":"Welcome to The Globe and Mail’s comment community. This is a space where subscribers can engage with each other and Globe staff. Non-subscribers can read and sort comments but will not be able to engage with them in any way. Click here to subscribe.

If you would like to write a letter to the editor, please forward it to letters@globeandmail.com. ","preambleSubscribed":"Welcome to The Globe and Mail’s comment community. This is a space where subscribers can engage with each other and Globe staff.

We aim to create a safe and valuable space for discussion and debate. That means:

If you do not see your comment posted immediately, it is being reviewed by the moderation team and may appear shortly, generally within an hour.

We aim to have all comments reviewed in a timely manner.

Comments that violate our community guidelines will not be posted.

UPDATED: Read our community guidelines here

We have closed comments on this story for legal reasons or for abuse. All articles covering the Middle East are closed to commenting to prevent further misinformation and abuse in the comments. For more information on our commenting policies and how our community-based moderation works, please read our Community Guidelines and our Terms and Conditions.

Welcome to The Globe and Mail’s comment community. This is a space where subscribers can engage with each other and Globe staff.

We aim to create a safe and valuable space for discussion and debate. That means:

If you do not see your comment posted immediately, it is being reviewed by the moderation team and may appear shortly, generally within an hour.

Subscribers who are logged in to their Globe account can post comments on most articles for up to 48-hours following the publication of an article on globeandmail.com. Closing comments after a short window of time helps to ensure effective moderation so that conversations remain civil and on topic. Comments may also be closed at any time for legal reasons or abuse.

We aim to have all comments reviewed in a timely manner.

Comments that violate our community guidelines will not be posted.

UPDATED: Read our community guidelines here

Welcome to The Globe and Mail’s comment community. This is a space where subscribers can engage with each other and Globe staff.

We aim to create a safe and valuable space for discussion and debate. That means:

If you do not see your comment posted immediately, it is being reviewed by the moderation team and may appear shortly, generally within an hour.

We aim to have all comments reviewed in a timely manner.

Comments that violate our community guidelines will not be posted.

UPDATED: Read our community guidelines here